The text was just an example (lorem ipsum dolor...). The actual text uses a lot of hyphens to split long words and I can't use Illustrator's built-in dictionary to hyphenate them for me. These hyphens have to be EXACTLY in the right spots, hence the need for manual break lines (Shift+Enter).

You think this behaviour is normal? Because even though these are just two paragraphs, it behaves like every line is an individual paragraph. The icons are very misleading. They act exactly like the first 3.

There may be a bug in the CS versions (there seems to be no soft line break up to 10), but it should be possible to get Illy to behave if you set the Word spacing in the Paragraph flyout and the Hyphenation options for the troublesome words.

It's a problem Jacob There are many instances where adjusting spacing will alter lines which were previously fine. Basically it's a catch 22.... you get bad lines... fix spacing to correct the bad lines... you get other bad lines. What is needed is the ability to add a soft return (a la Indesign) and maintain the justification.

The current workaround is to add a hard return and then adjust any paragraph spacing and/or line spacing for the line above the hard return. It's WAY more trouble than it should be.

Not a bug by my definition but a poor feature or I won't be surprised if it is deliberately limited because they use it in the same way in Photoshop. If you copy text with non-paragraph breaks (soft returns) from Illustrator and paste it in inDesign the hidden characters show that Illustrator uses another kind of character that has nothing to do with soft return.

Trust Scott and me on the emil emil this is an acknowledged bug it is not supposed to work this way

We know this as a fact it is not suuposed to work this way it is supposed to work as the OP expects it to work. It is a short coming of the type engine but also because it is not implemented properly.

Doug Katz pointed out the there was n soft returns in Illustrator and so I made the feature request and when the soft returns where supported he immediately pointout the bug as i recall right heere on the forum and i filed the bug immediately after it was acknowledged after several other users confirmed the bug and it was never corrected.

If it is acknowledged by Adobe as a bug, then it is a bug. Did Adobe respond to someone with such confirmation?

What makes me think that it may not be a bug is the fact that Photoshop also has the same bug - in its paragraph panel it has the same text justifying options and lines with soft returns are treated the same. I'm also with the OP on this expecting the normal behavior to be the same as inDesign but I've seen crippled features made by design. I'll be happy to be wrong because if it is officially acknowledged as a bug then there is a chance they may eventually fix it.

You never seem to read this correctly I clearly wrote that they have acknowledge it do you really think I am making this up?

Trust me I had communications with Adobe about this in what form I cannot tell you but this is a bug. Like it or not and you might think what you wish it will not change anything and unless they have address this issue in CS 6 then it is a bug that is still there.

It's a bug!

There are beta testers that comne this forum regularly if it were not a bug trust me they would have jumped in by now.

OK, my bad then, I missed to read that or didn't understand it is officially acknowledged by Adobe. I guess they are using the same code in Photoshop too - may be the same team is writing that part for multiple programs.

This problem doesn't exist in ID, so yes different code. Even aside from this problem, identical text doesn't justify the same in AI vs ID. Might not be noticable in a single paragraph, but set a couple of thousand words in both programs and compare and you'll find plenty of different line breaks.